An interview with Orkhan Salahov, Deputy Director of Azerbaijan's DOST Digital Innovations Centre
Edition #104 Salahov talks about how Azerbaijan's "friend" is paving the way in creating a "one stop shop" and delivering proactive services...
In this interview, first published in GovInsider, interweave sits down with Orkhan Salahov, the Deputy Director of the Azerbaijani Ministry of Labor’s DOST Digital Innovations Center. In a wide-ranging conversation, we discuss the foundations of the center, attempts at creating a “one stop digital shop” for social services, and how the Azerbaijani version of proactive services might differ from those elsewhere.
From the beginning of our conversation the Deputy Director of Azerbaijan’s DOST Digital Innovations Centre, Orkhan Salahov, is keen to stress two things.
First, he wants to present the human face of his center’s digital offerings.
“DOST means ‘friend’ in Azerbaijani”, he tells me, and his center since 2022 has been serving as a focal point of the digital modernization of Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of Population.
In this short period of time, the Innovations Center has served more than 9.2 million people (in a country of 10.2 million) through services such as digital distribution of birth and disability benefits.
Out of the Ministry’s 160 services, 91.5 per cent have been digitized to date, with 56 per cent using a proactive mechanism that requires no citizen input at all.
The second thing Salahov stresses is that this success has been a long time in the making. In a recent interview with David Eaves, the creator of the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) Map, we talked about the fact that while DPI seems to have exploded over the past year, in fact it has been something of a 20-year overnight success.
Similarly, Salahov outlines four periods of Azerbaijani state social sector digitalization, reaching right back to “computerization and digital infrastructure” back in 2003.
Creating a “one stop shop” digital center
While e-government efforts are nothing new in Azerbaijan, a Presidential Decree expanded the utilization of e-services for labor, employment, social protection and social security back in 2018.
It was on the back of this decree that the DOST Innovations Center was established in 2022, the unification of all IT departments and processes from the Ministry into a single institution.
Prior to this, the Ministry and its subordinate bodies each had separate IT departments, mostly functioning as “help desks” rather than actively providing services themselves.
The creation of DOST Innovations Centre is just one part of a larger digital social journey in Azerbaijan. Source: DOST Azerbaijan
DOST Centers today operate as “one-stop-shops”, serving as front offices that provide citizens with social services across employment, labor, disability services and social protections. Through a platform designed to automate the creation, storage and retrieval of information (CEIS), the DOST Centers can draw on 17 comprehensive social registries.
To ensure seamless information flow and the efficient delivery of electronic services in the social sector, the Ministry’s information integrates data from over 80 state and private institutions, facilitated by a “digital bridge” providing a centralized system for nationwide information exchange.
Proactive services the Azerbaijani way
One of the four formal missions of the DOST Innovations Center – perhaps the most innovative - is to “increase the number of services operating with a proactive service mechanism”.
Salahov tells me, “we do not wait for the citizens to declare any kind of services, rather the system creates and collects information about citizens and establishes their rights”.
He gives the example of disability payments.
“The process begins with identification, where the mechanism identifies individuals who have been granted disability status through a data subsystem, from which relevant data is retrieved,” he shares.
By coordinating with databases from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Ministry of Justice, and State Tax Service, the process gathers and validates an individual’s ID details, including confirming they are alive and have sufficient pension capital.
Once these verifications are complete, a disability benefit is automatically assigned to an individual.
“The system notifies the partnering bank about the need to open an account, and the bank issues a card to them. A text message is subsequently sent to the citizen, which informs them about the payment and how to access it.’
We have encountered the concept of proactive services in interviews before, for example in speaking to Kazakhstan’s Askar Zhambakin.
But what makes Azerbaijan’s approach unique, as Salahov says, is that while “Kazakhstan informs citizens of their right to access a payment via SMS and asks if they would like to receive it, in Azerbaijan the government automatically provides services as rights are established.”
This approach raises interesting questions about the limits and potential of proactive services.
For a citizen, Baku’s approach is of the utmost convenience, removing any risk of them not seeing a notification or not being sure how to authorize a payment.
However, it also raises questions about efficacy of services – deciding for an individual about whether the service is best for them. As each government approaches citizen services proactively, it will be up to them to determine to how far they go in their quest to remove any onus from the citizen.
Looking ahead to 2025
Clearly, this model of proactivity is working for Azerbaijan, and this means that DOST Innovations Center is able to execute as many as 25,000 assignments in one day. In 2024 alone, over 250,889 individuals received a proactive social payment, the most commonly assigned being the lump sum birth benefit.
Looking ahead to 2025, the Center’s ambition remains undimmed.
It plans to implement a data-driven proactive approach, where proactive notifications and services form the foundation for all other processes. So too, in a nod to one of the other pre-eminent trends of digital government today, does Salahov expect AI to play an increasingly significant role for the center.
“We believe that chatbot interactions and call center activities are key areas where AI can provide significant benefits”, he says.
“At the Innovations Centre, we have already established an AI division, which has begun researching trends and conducting initial assessments to identify areas that can be transformed to AI-driven mechanisms”.
With DOST Digital Innovations Center’s impressive pre-existing commitment to end-to-end proactive services, these AI mechanisms stand to serve Azerbaijan more than most.